﻿I/O SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



interval and there is always the possibility that new facts may be 

 discovered ; but such is the present status of the question. 



We find further that Leif reached the fox-grape-bearing coast 

 of the continent, probably as low as southeastern Massachusetts at 

 the least ; that he touched at several points and brought back certain 

 products ; that the chances would favor the Gulf of Maine for his 

 storm-driven landfall and a subsequent long run down the shore after 

 the fashion of other navigators ; but we know little of the voyage 

 except the general impression of warmth and natural bounty which 

 his report made at home. 



We find also that Thorfinn successfully carried his colonists to 

 Labrador, Newfoundland, and Cape Breton, thence along the Atlantic 

 coast of Nova Scotia to the great Bay of Fundy, near which they 

 made their first home, probably on the Passamaquoddy shore and 

 Grand Manan. 1 Afterward they removed to a much more southern 

 spot, and remained there for a year, then returned to the Fundy 

 region, making an incidental exploration of Nova Scotia and the 

 southeastern shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and at last regaining 

 Greenland and Iceland after three years' American experience. Hop, 

 their most southern point, was either on the eastern coast of New 

 England below Maine or in the basin of Narragansett Bay, with a 

 slight preponderance of probability for the latter. 



Besides these voyages, two attempts were made, Thorstein's in 

 1002 and Bishop Eric Gnupson's in 1121. The former failed, the 

 latter vanished ; and nothing ever came of their endeavors. 



The three " lands " explored by Karlsefni kept their names until 

 more modern ones were substituted. Helluland soon came to mean all 

 the desolate country above the forest, whether with flat stones or with- 

 out them, and was a favorite field for later fictitious sagas. 



Markland probably stood always for Greenland's nearest supply 

 of growing timber, that is for Newfoundland, perhaps with some 

 vague extension to neighboring shores. The traditional view of 

 the errand of the little ship of 1347 as a timber-gatherer may have 

 originated in a knowledge of prevailing custom or in some unrecorded 

 statement of its crew. If it had not been torn from its anchorage 

 and driven to Iceland we should never have heard of it, any more 

 than of the many others which we may conjecture to have made the 

 trip successfully, escaping or outliving the storms. 



1 Dr. Nans en believes in a visit or visits to these points and an encounter 

 with Indians, not Eskimo, somewhere on the Atlantic coast below Cape Breton ; 

 but he is uncertain as to the particular explorers and thinks the name Wine- 

 land wholly mythical, though calling Markland "historic." 



